Authors: Ned Beauman
His consciousness is distilled instantly into two volumes, one melted and the other frozen: below, the hug of Cherish’s interior and the sting of her fingernails; above, the awareness that he really isn’t supposed to be seeing this and the question of whether to mention it. Fortunately, it isn’t that serious an oversight on Cherish’s part, because from this angle he can’t see a street sign or a pub or anything else that could lead Lacebark back to this flat if they interrogated him about it – this peep-show is just a bin and a tree and the awning of a noodle buffet. And at least he knows for sure now that he’s not back inside the freight depot.
Then, as Cherish locks her ankles across the backs of his calves, he realises it’s not a noodle buffet. It’s a noodel buffet. It’s Noodels City, the most conspicuous misspelling in all of south London. He sees the illuminated red sign with its two endoscopic ovals of chow mein every time he goes past Camberwell Green on the bus. Which means he now knows approximately where he is, and if he needed to locate this flat, he could just stand outside Noodels City and look around for the blacked-out windows on the third floor of a building opposite. Without even trying, he has found out precisely what he wasn’t supposed to find out. And somehow he already feels certain that it would have been a lot better if he hadn’t. Cherish murmurs to him to go faster. Caught between these two narrow apertures like the laser beam in the experiment proving that light is both a particle and a wave, interference patterns rippling across the goosebumps on his forearms, Raf wishes that for the last few minutes he could have been struck blind.
Day 12
11.22 a.m.
Last night, before he fell into bed like a corpse into a gulch, Raf could just about whip his fingers into sending one more message to Fitch: ‘I know you’re not the chemist who’s making all the glow. So who are you?’ By this stage in his cycle the vanguard of his slumber has overrun most of morning, and when he wakes up he can see that it rained while he was still asleep – except he doesn’t feel as if he missed the rain, he feels as if he was there watching it, in the freight depot and then in Zaya’s story and then in a frenetic dream of which he can’t remember any other details – three unreal rains that coagulated into one real one.
Raf goes back to his computer. Fitch’s reply – ‘how you know I’m not him?’ – came in only seventeen minutes ago, which means he might still be online.
Raf writes, ‘Because I met the chemist yesterday. He didn’t speak English, and you do.’
As he was hoping, the next message arrives within a few minutes. ‘oh you that confused-looking white guy? early 20s, blue eyes? actually, my English is fine, you can see that, but it’s not like she gave us much of a chance to chat when she showed you around.’
Raf is so stunned that he doesn’t stop to think about his next question. ‘So it was you that I met in the kitchen when I was with Cherish?’
The final message comes back right away like a slap. ‘no names. fucking moron’
Raf tries to send another reply, but the Lotophage message system won’t allow it.
Fitch has blocked him.
When you’re having an anonymous conversation with no way to visualise the opposite end, the internet’s strange acoustics can give you the illusion that the other voice comes from some cluster of points very nearby, so that when it stops you feel disproportionately spooked and bereft, as if the birds outside your window have fallen silent all at once. Raf could just register for a new account and send Fitch/Win a message from that one, but it doesn’t seem as if he’d have any hope of getting a reply. So he’s left with a puzzle: why would Cherish want him to think that Win didn’t speak English? Whatever the reason, Win himself must be willing to go along with the lie, because he didn’t intervene to correct it back at the flat. Assuming he wasn’t just lockjawed with shyness, the best explanation Raf can think of is that, on the contrary, Cherish believes Win to be so dangerously indiscreet that he can’t be trusted to have even a casual conversation with an outsider in case classified information starts leaking out of him like yolk out of a poached egg. And, on one hand, maybe she’s right to be worried, since Win keeps showing off his expertise on the internet for no useful reason; Cherish probably doesn’t even know that Win posts about glow on Lotophage, otherwise it seems certain she would have stopped him by now. On the other hand, Win can’t really be that careless if he brought down the guillotine on this latest correspondence the moment Raf was stupid enough to mention Cherish’s name.
While he’s getting ready to take Rose for an overdue walk, hoping it will rinse his head clear, an ad comes on Myth FM for the rave that Isaac is putting on at the empty Lacebark warehouse in Walworth on Friday. There’s a mobile phone number for people to call on the day of the rave to find out the location, which the ad repeats about nine times. He sends Isaac a text message: ‘You’re still buying ads on Myth??’ Raf feels guilty enough just for listening, but the problem is there’s no other station that plays so much of the music he likes.
Isaac texts back: ‘Dickson keeps the cash. Anyway, if I don’t get a decent crowd, that means we’ve let Lacebark win!!!’
Day 13
12.33 p.m.
Fourpetal passes across the table an article torn from last night’s
Evening Standard
. Most of the headline is missing so Raf reads from the first paragraph.
Rock singer Matty Wilton is due back in court today to face charges connected to his noisy parties.
The twenty-four-year-old Calmatives frontman, who was recently given a suspended sentence for cocaine possession, will appear at Southwark Magistrates’ Court charged with breaching a noise abatement order. Wilton was first served the order in March after neighbours complained to the police, but council officials claim the all-night parties have continued.
Local resident Latimer Nollic said: ‘My wife and I have two young daughters and they can’t sleep when the music is coming through the wall into their bedrooms. Sometimes it’s four or five nights a week.’
Guests including TV presenter Tabitha Derby and model Lizzy Kyeremateng have been photographed leaving Wilton’s home in the early hours. The five-bedroom house on Camberwell Grove, south London, is believed to belong to Wilton’s parents.
The photograph above the article has the caption ‘Matty Wilton’s party house’, with a margin of blue sky clouded only by Fourpetal’s greasy fingerprints, and an inset of Wilton himself wearing a straw hat and aviator shades.
‘What has this got to do with anything?’ says Raf. Yet again, they’re sitting in McDonald’s; sometimes it feels as if they’re having an affair and this is their favourite discreet rendezvous.
‘Latimer Nollic is Lacebark’s Chief Operating Officer. His wife is English – Old Bedalian, I think – so they spend about half the year in London and half the year in North Carolina. I saw him give a speech at a conference once.’
‘How do you know it’s the same guy?’
‘How many people do you think there are in London called Latimer Nollic?’
‘OK, but what does the Chief Operating Officer of a company like Lacebark make a year?’
‘Maybe two to three million dollars, including bonuses, stock options, and pension contributions.’
‘And you’re saying he decided to live in Camberwell?’ says Raf. ‘Half a mile from Noodels City?’
‘Have you seen all those Georgian mansions at the south end of Camberwell Grove? It doesn’t look much like the rest of Camberwell. Still, you do have a point. Perhaps his wife has a sentimental attachment to the area. Anyway, if we go down there, we can work out from the photo which house belongs to this pop singer’s parents, and then we’ll know that Nollic lives in one of the houses either side.’
‘And how does that help us?’
‘This is our chance to get to Nollic when he’s not at the Lacebark offices surrounded by security. We go down there, pull him into the bushes the next time he goes jogging or something, and hold him hostage until Lacebark agrees to withdraw their troops from south London.’
‘Are you serious?’ Although Fourpetal’s bunker of misanthropy probably makes him better prepared than most people for living on the run with nobody to trust, Raf doesn’t get the sense that it’s been very good for his state of mind: even in the ten days since they met, the guy seems to have frayed and crinkled, as if the ketchup stain on his lapel was just the first surface indication of a deeper haemorrhage. Raf is alarmed by the thought that at this point he might be Fourpetal’s best friend.
‘Utterly serious. You said yourself, things are going to get very gory around here before long, and your freedom fighter pals have no idea what to do about it. We have to take extreme measures. In any case, kidnapping is apparently all the rage at the moment. I’m almost embarrassed that I’ve still never kidnapped anyone myself. It’s like being the last person in your year at school to finger a girl.’
‘No. This is a bad idea.’
‘Look, I’m going to go down there and find Nollic’s house whether you come with me or not. Anyway, Harenberg reports to Nollic. Pankhead mentioned him in that email. For all we know Nollic is the real power behind everything that’s happened. Wouldn’t you at least like to see his face?’
Raf fiddles with his straw, herding the ice around the bottom of his cup. Last night, just before he got chauffeured home with a hood over his head, he asked Ko how he got involved in all this. ‘Lacebark kill my friends in Gandayaw,’ Ko said.
‘So what now?’ Raf said. ‘What’s the mission?’
Ko shrugged. ‘No more kill.’ That seemed sensible. And seeing Nollic isn’t going to save anyone’s life. But Raf has to admit that he’s curious.
6.25 p.m.
Fourpetal was right about Camberwell Grove: it doesn’t look anything like the rest of Camberwell. With the sycamores leaning protectively over the narrow roadbed and the semi-detached houses set back at a haughty remove from the pavement, it’s impossible to imagine any sort of fuss or flurry ever being permitted here, which makes it an example of a paradox Raf’s noticed about certain posh segments of the city: the quieter and more secluded the street, the more likely its architects are to have topologised the zone between the kerb and the homes on either side with such a pedantic and well-proportioned bagatelle of gates, railings, trees, hedges, bollards, and low stone walls that you might have guessed they were expecting twice-daily inundations of people, livestock, ball bearings, ginger syrup, or some other rushing matter whose complex fluid dynamics could be disciplined only by the most meticulous advance planning.
‘You know, it was John Coakley Lettsome who planted the gardens behind these houses,’ says Fourpetal. ‘Quite appropriate in the circumstances.’
‘Who’s that?’ says Raf.
‘Like most of the characters in our present narrative, he was a collector of rare plants and experimental herbs. He moved here in the 1780s when Camberwell was still just a village with a serious hedgehog problem and an actual well.’
Raf shrugs. He’s always felt that if you have to research what was going on before you were born to find London interesting or magical, you don’t really deserve to live there. Right now the two of them are hiding behind a turreted pink Wendy house in the garden across the road from Latimer Nollic’s villa. If they get caught, they’re planning to pretend to be obsessive Calmatives fans. They know which address is Nollic’s because half an hour ago an SUV pulled up to the right of Matty Wilton’s alleged sin palace and Fourpetal recognised Nollic as he went inside. Raf has passed the time since then giving Fourpetal a few more specifics of what happened to him the day before yesterday, both at the freight depot and at the flat on Camberwell Green. He explained the basics back in McDonald’s but there was such an overwhelming amount to tell that he was too impatient to go into detail.
‘So the Lacebark woman called it an “installation”?’ says Fourpetal. ‘The flat with the unconvincing chemist in it?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s funny. Normally you only hear about a person being “installed” in furnished lodgings when it’s some aristocrat’s mistress in a biography. “He installed her at the Dorchester.” “He installed her in a fashionable apartment in the Marais.” As if it’s not a human being but an appliance. Accurate, perhaps, in both contexts.’
‘How are you getting on with
Lacunosities
?’
‘After several hours with it I now know that warfare, like tailoring, is all about transversality, aporia, and endopolitics.’
‘What does that mean?’
Fourpetal exhales. ‘Yes, well . . . The thing is, I read some Kant at Cambridge, and I understood most of that. But I can’t understand any of this. Which I suppose demonstrates beyond question that this Villepinte fellow must be a lot cleverer than Kant was.’
Nollic’s front door opens, and the two of them crouch lower. A girl of about seven years old comes down the steps under the pediment, followed by a second, almost identical girl, then a tan Pomeranian on a leash and finally Nollic himself, who was wearing a suit before but has now changed into khakis and a loose checked shirt. They look like a TV ad for expensive private health insurance. As they pass, one of the girls says, ‘Daddy, are you taking us to the climbing wall on Saturday?’